The Basement Tapes

Reinaldo Arenas dedicated most of his books to telling and retelling his life story. The first time was in his debut novel, Singing from the Well (1967), about his abusive childhood in the rural Cuban province of Holguín. He told it again in The Color of Summer (1982), a loosely autobiographical satire set in Havana’s underground youth circles during the jubilee of a fictional tyrant. But he only told it directly at the end of his life, in his memoir Before Night Falls, which was published in Spanish and English in 1992, two years after committed suicide at forty-seven, following a yearslong struggle with AIDS. Julian Schnabel’s film adaption won the Grand Jury Prize at the 2000 Venice International Film Festival. In it, the author, played by Javier Bardem, recounts his memories to the camera during his last days in New York.

If the fiction obscured Arenas’s life behind the stained glass of neo-baroque style, Before Night Falls did the opposite, laying out his history of suffering and upheaval in lucid prose. He was born in 1943 in a small town in Holguín, one of the poorest regions of the country, and moved as a young man to Havana. During the late 1960s and early 1970s, at the height of the sexual revolution, he was persecuted for his sexuality as well as for his writing, which the police stole and even burnt. In 1980 he escaped on the Muriel boatlift to Miami as a “sexual dissident,” eventually making his way to New York, where he continued to speak out against Castro—most notably in a public letter in these pages that Susan Sontag and Czesław Miłosz, among others, signed. Living on 44th Street, he found glimpses of happiness: he partied openly, travelled, taught literature in Miami and at the Sorbonne. In 1987 he was diagnosed with AIDS and began working on his memoir.

But Arenas didn’t actually write Before Night Falls, in the strictest sense of the word. He was very sick at the time, barely able to breathe, let alone to put pen to paper. “The pain was awful and the tiredness was overwhelming,” he says in the prologue. He started “dictating the story of my life into a tape recorder. I would speak for a while, take a rest, and then continue.” During the next three months, he collaborated with his friend and neighbor, Antonio Valle, who typed up the text. He recorded more than twenty tapes, then killed himself, blaming Castro in his suicide note. 

Given the unusual nature of the book’s composition, the tapes of Before Night Falls are a subject of much scholarly interest, all the more so because they were long thought to have been lost. As a graduate student, I had sought them out in university archives and contacted the Arenas estate as well as the children of one of his translators, but no one seemed to have a clue. Like Poe’s purloined letter, however, they were hiding in plain sight, in the form of compact discs stored at the University of Miami’s library in a wide-ranging archive called the Cuban Heritage Collection, which contains everything from prominent émigrés’ papers to Cuban restaurant ephemera. This spring, archivists made them available to me digitally. When I started listening I discovered a raw, candid, and intimate side of Arenas—a writer working in real time, beyond his mythology, and painfully aware of nearing death.

The tapes begin with the image of Arenas, as a toddler, eating dirt with his cousin Dulce. “I was a skinny kid,” he says, “but my gut was enormous, due to the worms growing in my stomach.” He speaks melodiously, describing the surroundings of Holguín with a lilting rhythm, almost as if singing a lullaby. I began to understand why the prose of Before Night Falls is starkly different from the rest of his work. This is a book infused with the orality of a recording; Arenas seems to be telling us a story, commanding our attention with a performance. 

Evoking a child’s perspective, his descriptions are gently exaggerated and border on the fantastic: an unnamed river, the site of a monstrous current, becomes a metaphor for all the mysteries of life; the bushes, grass, and animals make for an Eden. “I would reach the river and would stare at its immensity,” he says. “The immensity of that current that overflew, that took everything with it…in huge buoys—animals, trees, birds. It was the mystery of destruction and also of life … Why didn’t I throw myself into those waters? Why didn’t I get lost in them?” Then, as he heads back home, the tape stops abruptly. The last thing we hear is that his mother didn’t care where he was, or whether he was alive. 

Some of the tapes still seem to be missing. As Arenas grew up I returned to the memoir to fill in the gaps. When the revolution breaks out, fifteen-year-old Arenas briefly joins a band of rebels, although he is disenchanted when they murder a local peasant indiscriminately. In 1960 he heads to the capital in an erotically charged train ride with other men and enrolls in the University of Havana to study agricultural accounting, a new department that aimed at producing, in his words, “communist youth.” By then he was sickened by his machismo—he dated two girls at the same time to hide his homosexuality. 

The tapes pick up again in Havana, where Arenas starts writing poetry and novels. He wins a prize for Singing from the Well and gets inducted into the “cultured aristocracy of the National Library,” trading the farm paperwork (which he found tedious, by the tone of his voice) for a literary career at the José Martí Library, where he meets the writers and poets Cintio Vitier, Fina García Marruz, and Eliseo Diego, and is mentored by both José Lezama Lima and Virgilio Piñera, queer titans of Cuban literature who, in time, the government also harassed for their sexuality. Not having a concrete task, he reads everything that crosses his path—he and his friends recite banned poetry, like that of Jorge Luis Borges and Octavio Paz. When he describes navigating the library and encountering the rows and rows of books there, his voice gains a vigor—the same passion he brings to the landscape of Holguín. 

As the revolution advances, however, Arenas grows suspicious of the world of letters. Initially, he says, the famous writers that staffed the National Library, hired during the previous government, had contempt for the Castro regime, even saying, behind closed doors, that they wanted to flee. “The day I have to write an ode in praise of Fidel Castro,” Diego (anonymized as Eliseo Otero in the final text) says, “or an ode to this revolution—that’s the day when I’ll cease to be a writer.” But one by one they align with the regime, turning into “talking heads for Fidel Castro” and using political connections to advance their careers. Indeed, Diego writes odes to the revolution, and when two women are seen kissing in the bathroom, his colleagues overthrow the beloved director for allowing “lesbianism” within her library. Soon Arenas is hiding his writing in the same way he hides his sexuality and his political affiliation.

In Communist Cuba, queerness (or really any sexual deviance) was seen as bourgeois and counterrevolutionary—the “New Man,” according to Che Guevara’s philosophy, had to be a virile father figure whose offspring would carry on the cause. Under Castro, traditional gender roles were encouraged at school and in state institutions. There was a moral panic about the lure of homosexuality. Men suspected to be queer (including many of Arenas’s lovers and friends) were interned, along with Christians and other “antirevolutionary” citizens, at Military Units for Aid Production (UMAP), a forced agricultural labor camp. By then a respected writer, Arenas was still targeted for his libidinal and politically satirical books. In 1966 the same jury that had given an award to Singing From The Well refused to honor Hallucinations: or, The Ill-Fated Peregrinations of Fray Servando, a formally inventive and sexually explicit novel about an eighteenth-century priest that remains banned in Cuba. Piñera told Arenas that the jury preferred not to declare a winner.

It was around this time that Arenas befriended Jorge and Margarita Camacho, leftist Spanish painters who were visiting Havana for a conference. The couple were walking through the Vedado promenade when they found a small bookstore with Singing from the Well in its window. “Curious to see what it was about, Jorge started reading it at night,” Margarita, now in her eighties, told me when we spoke over the phone this May. “And I went to bed. When I woke up, it was morning, and Jorge had stayed up all night. I’ve discovered a genius, Jorge said to me, and we started looking for Reinaldo.”

The Camachos invited Arenas to the Hotel Nacional, where Winston Churchill and Rita Hayworth once stayed. Initially distrustful of their generosity, he soon opened up, revealing that the situation in the country was not as it seemed from abroad and confessing that he could no longer publish there. Prolonging their stay for three months, the Camachos smuggled Arenas’s first two novels out with them for publication. Le monde hallucinant came out in French translation by Didier Coste and Liliane Hasson before it appereard in Spanish, and so did Arenas’s third novel, The Palace of the White Skunks, which was also taken out secretly.

In Cuba, where intellectual property belongs to the state, this was illegal. By 1973 Arenas was not only persecuted for his writing but also accused of “corruption of minors”—a crime for which proof wasn’t required if the offender was a gay man. He was sent to several prisons, briefly released after confessing to his so-called felonies, and imprisoned again. Finally, while the guards were distracted by the arrival of fresh coffee (a luxury at the time), Arenas fled through a fence. Thereafter he spent most of his days in hiding, writing poetry and reading The Iliad in the branches of trees in Parque Lenin. 

The Camachos were instrumental in bringing Arenas’s work into public view. Margarita was effectively his unofficial literary agent and Jorge helped him write the open letter, which he cosigned. Throughout the years, other mentors like Piñeira and Lima had helped Arenas edit manuscripts. In the case of Before Night Falls, a group of four people, living between New York and Paris, shaped the text into its final form. In the Arenas Archives at Princeton, they are referred to, with an air of academicism, as “The Committee”: Antonio Valle, Dolores Koch, Margarita, and Liliane Hasson. 

Valle, whom Arenas acknowledges by name in Before Night Falls, had been Gabriel García Márquez’s secretary in Havana before escaping, while working for the Cartagena Film Festival, through the American Embassy in Bogotá. He arrived in New York City in 1988 and, by luck or fate, became next-door neighbors with Arenas, with whom he struck up a friendship. Arenas confided in him, and during the three months he was at work Valle transcribed the original tapes. In his fictionalized memoir, El entorno del silencio (The Setting of Silence), Valle writes that Arenas hid himself after he became visibly sick, “in the same way animals hide themselves to die.”¹ He would slide the cassettes under Valle’s door and, once a chapter was done, pass handwritten edits and suggestions over the phone. During this time Reinaldo also talked with Koch, one of his English translators and a loyal friend. Once the tapes were transcribed, she edited the manuscript and sent it to Paris for Margarita and Hasson’s supervision. 

Arenas’s work with the Committee was in keeping with his careerlong reliance on friends. But they had a more decisive influence than his other collaborators: the contrast between the tapes and the published book is significant. Orally, Arenas often begins a sentence two or three times, uttering the same thing with a slightly different phrasing. Someone—an editor, an amanuensis—chose among those options. Sometimes he mixes up facts or exaggerates to the point of invention, and an invisible hand corrects him in print. Entire paragraphs are moved around, scenes are changed, deleted, or edited down. Characters are anonymized. 

A notable difference between the tapes and the final manuscript is that, for unknown reasons, the Committee left out Arenas’s account of his struggle with AIDS. In the published version, Before Night Falls ends with an expeditive survey of his flight to the US, his time in Miami, his travels in Europe, and various dreams about Lezama Lima, his mother, and his then-partner Lázaro. “O Moon!” Arenas writes, “You have always been by my side, offering your life in the most dreadful moments…. And now, Moon, you suddenly burst into pieces right next to my bed. I am alone. It is night.” This is followed by his suicide note, which he directed to be printed by “D.M.K.,” or Dolores Mercedes Koch.

The tapes tell this episode only in passing. Instead the narration goes on, as Arenas’s breathing worsens in the winter of 1988. “New York wasn’t the vital, beautiful city full of adventures that I had known,” he says. “It was a leper colony. The millionaire classes had taken over and incessantly expelled those who lived in modest buildings.” He writes against the clock, rushing to complete novels. As suicidal visions creep in, he goes to Miami in search of a warmer climate. But when the coughing becomes incessant, he checks himself into a hospital in Jacksonville, then decides to return to New York rather than stay in the facility’s moribund AIDS wings (“where nobody gets any care”). On the plane back home he loses consciousness, and a crew member pronounces him dead. Lázaro forces an oxygen mask onto his lover’s face and miraculously revives him. 

The image of the moon from the book’s final chapter occurs in a quieter and more haunted way in the tapes. When Arenas gets to Bellevue Hospital, the staff plugs devices into him to help him breathe. “I was a man on the moon, on a planet without oxygen, and I had to breathe through strange masks,” he says. “Earth had become uninhabitable.” The image of an exploding moon appears later: Arenas alleges that Castro’s secret foreign service broke into his home, smashing his nightstand water glass into pieces—like the moon bursting beside his bed. Arenas interpreted this as a warning that he was still being followed. The second time the secret service left behind an envelope full of poison, suggesting he kill himself. To spite them, he kept living: “No, my dear enemies. If I kill myself, it will be by my own initiative, not to give you the pleasure.”

Many Cuban exiles in the US held everything capitalist dear, but Arenas was clear-eyed about the inequities of his adopted country. He describes the American health care system in the same bold and cheeky way he exposed Castro’s corruption. The nurses and doctors, he says, take care of the rich AIDS patients properly while leaving the poor in agony. (One poor patient recieves poison from a friend.) Each morning, they ask about Arenas’s Medicaid but not about his health. “I was worried I was going to die of their voluntary negligence,” he says. 

The last tape, numbered 11.2, was recorded on July 4, 1990. Arenas is delirious. He imagines that the devil is looking for his writing while glamorous women dance on the beeping machines that measure his heartbeat, dolled up for his funeral. His voice is dimming. He dreams about getting on a boat in the Hudson to celebrate America’s independence with beautiful men:

I’ll see the island of Manhattan from afar, as if it were still the island of my dreams. I’ll be strong enough to dance in the maelstrom of the young, and the deafening music among the fireworks. I’ll raise my silent testament to that sky—I don’t regret anything of what I’ve done… and if time concedes me the grace of a few more weeks, a few more months, a few years of life, I will try to maintain, like one of the characters of my novels would do—to the very last hours—equanimity and rhythm.

The last thing we hear is Arenas struggling to take out the tape. “Well,” he says with his characteristic humor, “now what.”